All I can say is reading most comments, gief back TBC model. I will keep saying it, cause its the truth.

Everyone raided something, and you feelt like you did progress at your own level. Yes I didn't see Sunwell, but I was damn happy to do 4/5 MH and up to and included Bloodboil inn BT, didn't matter if I was never gonna see Sunwell. I was happy and satisfied the hole way.

People need something to do inn wow. When everyone gets everything, you loss long term goals fast. I loved logging on to wow with a long term goal, be it a grind for gear or some rep...

One reason for WoW decline I often hear is that its an old game and naturally people get bored with it. But TV is much older and people still watch that. Surely if a thing you once enjoyed keept staying fun, you would still use it?

I absolutely hate time trials. I would have greatly preferred an insanely hard dungeon. Think TBC heroics in mediocre gear, then double it.

This would never work, because there would be no way to do a ranking system without the time-trial aspect. Regardless of how insanely hard you make a 5 man, if it is designed so that it MUST be beatable with a 463 ilevel due to gear normalization, then the whole dungeon simply devolves into "do you know the mechanics", and "can you CC". The end. Which was exactly what TBC heroics were. There was no "skill" involved in them, it was all about having the right class comp for CCs. When anyone can clear the instance if all they do is take the time to carefully do each pull, how do you measure the Challenge?

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by DrMcNinja

What I thought was very lacking, is that there was no direct threat to the world.

In Cata, you had armies running about trying to beat eachother and Deathwing just about everywhere (With the exception of Uldum which was just some 'discovery' for the Indiana Jones crew)
In BC, you had outposts fighting demons on their borders
In Wrath, you had fucking undead and MASSIVE (See Warsong Hold) outposts fighting undead and other races loyal to Arthas all over the place.....

In MoP, we have 2 large threats: The Mogu and Mantid. And what do they do? The Mantid have an army that sits idle basically slapping you in the face if you run into them. Why aren't they fighting the Klaxxi? Their air forces get shot down every time I fly to the Dread Wastes.

The mogu, a nice big empire with an island that has fucking lightning striking down wherever Lei Shen wants, with an army in their courtyard. And just like that, Blood Elves and Kirin Tor stand on his doorstep as if he doesn't notice them. Where is the warcraft? Where is the direct confrontation? The only real Warcraft we get this expansion is in the Jade Forest in a cutscene, and in a raid which is called Siege of Orgrimmar..

Actually, the Mogu really were not much of a "big" threat in the sense you are looking for, since their great empire was crushed several thousand years before, and they only really had the POTENTIAL to become a big threat with the Re-awakening of the Thunder King. Which is why the Sunreavers / Kirin Tor assault the Throne of Thunder. The mogu are really just another "too soon" moment, in the sense that if they had been left alone for a while longer, they could have been a HUGE problem.

As to the Mantid, nearly all of their stuff is covered by the Dreadwastes / Townlong steppes lore and your interaction with the Shadow-pan. When the "heroes" arrive in townlong, You find out that the Shadow-pan defenses are practically on the edges of collapsing due to the constant Mantid Attacks. The mantid ARE a major threat, as can bee seen by the massive numbers of them being thrown at the wall, and if it wasnt for our efforts as players all of pandaria would probably be knee deep in panda corpses and mantid invaders. Thankfully the swarm was started pre-maturely and so is not really at full strength, and we have the Klaxxi, who are more interested in preserving the cycle (which incidentally, considers successfully killing off the non mantid races a BAD thing) to help us put an end to it before it becomes a problem.

I realise the game is called World of Warcraft, but that does not really mean that every single expantion has to be devoted to Alliance / Horde smashing eachother's heads in. I mean, that can only go on for so long before it becomes stupidly obvious that the only thing preventing one side from wipeing out the other is shoddy plot armor.

You'd think that if people found them interesting, they would play them more.

...What? How does not playing a race mean someone hates MoP as a whole? I'm not a huge fan of Pandarens, yet I love MoP. Its just a race. My favorite race lore-wise is the Forsaken, yet I play a Blood Elf. Yet by your logic that means I don't like the Forsaken at all.

For me, I think the dailies only giving 5 valor points per quest made them feel really Grindey. Maybe they should have rewarded 10-15 so the dailies could have been paced better. Then there's LFR. Don't get me wrong i enjoyed doing it the first time around but once I started leveling and then gearing my alts it got really boring real fast.

I loved logging on to wow with a long term goal, be it a grind for gear or some rep...

Exactly, I miss logging in for those projects, even super long grinds. Also,the loot tables were far more interesting in those days too, now in mop even a lockbox only contains mop greens (wtf is up with that blizzard?). Didn't care that I didn't see all raids, I liked that fact.. reward system Blizzard, don't forget the reward system! That's what keeps us playing, not everything on a plate or some things only because we logged in an hour a day to do damn dailies. Which I don't

All I can say is reading most comments, gief back TBC model. I will keep saying it, cause its the truth.

Everyone raided something, and you feelt like you did progress at your own level. Yes I didn't see Sunwell, but I was damn happy to do 4/5 MH and up to and included Bloodboil inn BT, didn't matter if I was never gonna see Sunwell. I was happy and satisfied the hole way.

Most people never got past Kharazan and while it was an awesome dungeon, raiding the same place for 2 years wasn't really fun.

Most people never got past Kharazan and while it was an awesome dungeon, raiding the same place for 2 years wasn't really fun.

I was one of those, and my god it was fun, we would raid 1-2 nights a week, occasionally try ZA or do 25 mans with another guild. I don't think a return to tbc style would be a bad thing anymore, but I don;t think its the fix needed me.

Most people never got past Kharazan and while it was an awesome dungeon, raiding the same place for 2 years wasn't really fun.

You are just lying now. Karazhan got extremly easy once badge gear inn Sunwell patch, and somewhat prio to that.

I renember pugging karazhan on alt character inn pugs I made myself or joined, quit a few times. And its not like I was picking top players - Just okay raiders, like myself, and maybe the odd 2-3 new people.

Infact once the 30% health nerf rolled inn, I pugged MH 5/5 and even killed Kiljaeden with a pure pug made by like 2-3 guilds. One guild had some good players join, but else...

Edit: Not to mention Lootreaver, Lurker the loot giver, and other very easy bosses, guilds would do as there first bosses when starting a new raid.

Last edited by Djuntas; 2013-07-29 at 12:57 PM.

One reason for WoW decline I often hear is that its an old game and naturally people get bored with it. But TV is much older and people still watch that. Surely if a thing you once enjoyed keept staying fun, you would still use it?

You are just lying now. Karazhan got extremly easy once badge gear inn Sunwell patch, and somewhat prio to that.

I renember pugging karazhan on alt character inn pugs I made myself or joined, quit a few times. And its not like I was picking top players - Just okay raiders, like myself, and maybe the odd 2-3 new people.

Infact once the 30% health nerf rolled inn, I pugged MH 5/5 and even killed Kiljaeden with a pure pug made by like 2-3 guilds. One guild had some good players join, but else...

The" most people got stuck in karazhan" thing is backed up from a blue quote, iirc. Karazhan is wows most popular ever raid, because most players coudn't get past it!

You are just lying now. Karazhan got extremly easy once badge gear inn Sunwell patch, and somewhat prio to that.

I renember pugging karazhan on alt character inn pugs I made myself or joined, quit a few times. And its not like I was picking top players - Just okay raiders, like myself, and maybe the odd 2-3 new people.

Infact once the 30% health nerf rolled inn, I pugged MH 5/5 and even killed Kiljaeden with a pure pug made by like 2-3 guilds. One guild had some good players join, but else...

Edit: Not to mention Lootreaver, Lurker the loot giver, and other very easy bosses, guilds would do as there first bosses when starting a new raid.

It's too bad that those old statistic sites are no longer available with data from back then. Right before WotLK was released only 25% of the people who killed a boss in Kharazan killed a boss in SSC or TK. That's only one quarter that moved on to the next raid, 75% of the players were stuck in Kara.
It may have been easy for you but not for the vast majority of players.

Even Zul Aman was too difficult for most players, there was a lot of complaining back then because many felt it had been tuned for people in T5.

Alt unfriendliness. My old main character is still sitting at 481 item level, my 3rd 90 is still half blue/green, and I've got an 89 and an 88 that I'm struggling to force myself to get that last bit up to 90. There are two portions to alt unfriendliness - gearing and levelling.

Gearing has been slow and painful and gated behind dailies, and crafted gear really is only available once your raid group is sharding a lot of things in the current tier and none of the mains need them, which means if you're not on heroics in the first few weeks it's going to be months after the raid is out. You can't cap valor just through the main raid. I love the valor bonus once you're capped, but it's annoying to cap most of the time (tho it's gotten easier as the expansion progressed, it's still more annoying than fun).

Questing is less linear and on rails than Cataclysm, but it's still limited to one main path. I like to quest, but aside from the split in V4W/Krasarang, you have to repeat the same set of quests on each and every character. Wrath questing was great. You could start in Borean or Fjord, hop over to the other one if you got bored, finish them both and skip Dragonblight entirely, go to Grizzly early if you felt leet, you had a choice between Sholazar or Zul, Storm Peaks or Icecrown. A lot of people never raid, never set foot in a dungeon. For them, questing is the thing. It has been far far too easy to get the Loremaster achievements for the last two expansions. Ideally, I would love to ding 90 on questing alone and still have half of the quests for each level range yet to do.

Battle.net always on. I'm our guild's main tank. I really wish there were an 'appear offline' option for battle.net because when I want to derp around on an alt, a lot of times I get guilted or socially manipulated into tanking something for someone. I know, I need to grow a backbone, but if I haven't done that in 48 years it's not likely to happen any time soon.

I've hated the linear nature of this expansion's raids. There are no optional bosses. That's the one thing I really liked about Firelands, you could choose your own path for the first 5 bosses, so if you were having issues with Rhyolith you could always hit your head on Beth'tilac. Horridon would not have caused nearly the forum controversy it did if you'd had the choice of him or Council or Iron Qon as your second boss. I know LFR wants them broken into wings of 3 in a row, but anyone willing to spend a few minutes on design can figure out ways to give a main raid multiple paths within that limitation.

It has also felt like feedback from PTR raiding fell on deaf ears, and patch QA has been poor. All of the Durumu issues were clearly laid out during PTR testing. Horridon went live with completely wrong health values for 10 man. So did Council. Vizier was really bad when it went live. etc.

Things I like:

I've enjoyed the boss mechanics and atmosphere of the raids this expansion.

I like challenge modes, though I've only really scratched the surface.

I enjoy pet battles, again I'm still just scratching the surface but they've been a fun timewaster.

I like the cooking and fishing catchup mechanisms in Tillers and Anglers.

I like the farm. It's nice to log on and get a little bonus materials for some profession or other. I'm going to be sad to let it go to weeds when the next expansion comes out.

I like the idea of optional individual rep grinds.

I like upgrading items with valor. It gives a constant use for those excess valor points once you've bought all the non-raid junk, and a quick way to boost you that tiny bit over some hurdle.

I thought that dungeon difficulty was just right. A bit hard at the beginning, pretty easy once you're geared, and if you like punishing there's always challenge mode.

I've really enjoyed the world bosses. I think they nailed those pretty well.

Levelling on day one of the launch was much more fun than when I did the same on Cata. I attribute this to all the hidden stuff around Pandaria: the treasures and the rare elites, which I found several of while levelling. The rare elites especially were exciting. I spent a half-dozen wipes trying to solo Eschelon as a Shadow priest in Dragon Soul gear, and it was great fun. Like a bite-sized bit of raiding content in the middle of my levelling. The non-trivial questing content at levels 88-90 was a plus as well; it made questing from a trivial chore into engaging content.

Casual Level 90 Content - Boring.

At max level, well, dailies are dailies, but there's no denying that it kept us busy. Still, the daily quests quickly (read: on day 2) became boring. The 5mans too were a disappointment. Even now I keep discovering mechanics that I never knew about because the 5mans are so undertuned that there's no need to care. Cataclysm's 5mans were much "meatier"; Mists' 5mans are like a light salad. Easy and not very satisfying. I kinda never checked out the scenarios, and there are still some (most?) that I never ran for lack of a heroic difficulty. They're tuned so absurdly easy that the only reason I would want to go to one is for the lore... but with two other players there, it's hard to stop and smell the lore. Scenarios would have been better if you could choose to go to them solo. On that note, heroic scenarios are undertuned too, although not by as much. I'm glad I'm not automatically locked out of the speed-run bonus just because I'm a healer, but when our third person can spend an entire run DC'd (leaving only a healer and a DPS) and we get the speed bonus with time to spare, then your timers are just WAY too loose.

All-in-all, under-tuning spoiled a lot of content for me.

There's also some really non-standard content in Mists that deserves a mention.

Pet Battles

Pet Battling occupied a week or so of my time. The fact that they ripped off Pokemon, and then made more interesting battles than Pokemon is pretty impressive. If it could be tweaked to do the things Pokemon does right just as well, it could really be a game unto its own.

The first problem I see is the "oddness" of the types. That is to say, Pokemon players know the type effectivenesses (water > fire > grass > water, etc.) but after casually playing pet battles, I have no clue what Magic type is good against. Also, Critter, Beast and Flying are way too common, leading to it feeling like there are only 3 types when you're battling wild pets.

Another problem is that the pet species aren't all that unique. You see the same old squirrel in 50 different zones. While that's no different than a Rattata, there are dozens of these ubiquitous "filler" pets, and even nominally different pet species often have identical stats and moves.

A core mechanic in the Pokemon games was sustaining your resources while traveling from place to place. Pet battles attempted to capture something similar by making sure that healing is fairly difficult. However, the only penalty to depleting your pets' health is a time one, and then only id Mend Pet wasn't already off cooldown. You'll also never have difficulty traveling into a new zone; your pets strength or remaining HP have nothing to do with this. You can just waltz right past (or fly over) all the pets and trainer that might be in your way. I'm not sure this can be solved in WoW.

Lastly, with only three stats, and only 8 possible move combinations for any given pet species (less at low levels) it's hard to make a pet you're training feel unique. How is my Dusk Spiderling different from yours? Answer: it's not. While in practice, people often taught their Pokemon the same sets of good moves for a given species, the fact remains that you could breed, spend your TMs, acquire a "shiny", etc and end up with one that was highly unusual. This is one case where Ghostcrawler's insistence that "false" options just lure players into gimping themselves doesn't work. No one takes Pokemon seriously, and this sense of personalization was core to the games.

Brawlers' Guild - Fun!

A place to test your DPS in a raid-like setting? Sweet. Hard (well, it was hard before H ToT gear...) content I can do without a group? Sweet. Exclusive access? Not so sweet. Waiting in line for other players to go? Cool to watch, but sucks when the wait gets too long. That bug where 6 boss fights go on at the same time? BEST. BUG. EVER. Overall, I recommend checking it out to anyone that still hasn't it's easily an afternoon of fun. Longer if you're bad.

Challenge Modes - Serious fun!

I'll admit, I checked these out pretty late. Still, it's not like I stacked socketted gear or reforged for it or anything. So really, gear scaling probably did its job in keeping it at its intended difficulty. If anything, I had it harder than the early people; I went after the Disc nerfs. Anyway, it was great fun. Foes just threatening enough to take seriously, while making a mad dash to the finish? Riotous fun. Pity 9/9 gold only took a day; I wish I had more to do. I recommend checking these out to just about everyone too. Gold is about as hard as 9/12 normal ToT, and Silver is probably attainable for anyone that can kill normal Horridon. The difficulty is just high enough not to be boring for serious raiders (although they will consume the content quickly), and not so high that casual players have no chance. Grab 4 friends and steamroll/progress them.

Harvest Moon, er, I mean, "Sunsong Ranch" (AKA Farmville) - Boring.

Frankly, this is just another daily hub, complete with the dailies. I know I enjoyed the Harvest Moon games, even the older, simpler ones. I can't tell why WoW's Harvest Moon clone fell so flat. Part of it is probably the focus on daily quests for progression, rather than actually farming, but like I said, I'm unsure. The rewards were enticing, but then, all the daily hubs were. Why do you think so many people were complaining about dailies? Good rewards gated behind boring content, leading to people playing content they don't like. Yuck.

Tier 14 - Fun!

I'm impressed at how well Blizzard balanced gear progressing this expansion. It took my semi-casual guild quite a while to finish normal mode, leaving us 6/16H when 5.2 dropped. The fact that it kept us steadily progressing for that long is a real testament to the fine balance of the raiding tier. Of special note: Elegon, Empress, Tsulong, H Will and H Sha were all particularly fun encounters. Kudos, raid design team!

People tell me HoF was overtuned. While Garalon was a tight-ish DPS check, the fact is my guild never hit a wall. Still, this is my only real complaint for the tier and it didn't even effect me personally.

Tier 15 - I cannot provide an unbiased opinion.

So, here's the deal though. Summer often sucks for guilds, and summer is really sucking right now. We raid fewer weeks than we fail to. Attendance issues suck. Roster churn sucks. Losing progress and failing to farm both suck. I hate raiding lately, but it's probably not ToT's fault. I do have one objective complaint, and that's the linearity. Raiding 4.5 hours/week is very harsh when you can't just choose not to do the bosses you don't care about this lockout (like you could in Ulduar, tier 14, etc.).

Dailies had good rewards behind them and a lot of people "felt" like they had to do them to get the content. But you only had one option to get the rep rewards and that was dailies. Golden lotus then was a major gate blocking access to some of the other factions so you had to do them first. I stopped bothering with dailies until 5.1 and only did those to do the awesome quest lines locked behind the rep.

Dungeons - Lack of dungeons in MOP was a bit of a shame I was really hopping we'd get a far larger number of dungeons with MOP. No new ones added was a bit of a letdown as well.

Raids - LFR worked fine for me but I feel like flex mode should have come with 5.0 This would have promoted pugs and more casual guilds into raiding. Might well have helped server communities into getting more pugs and stuff off the ground.

I don't think it was any one single thing that happened, but the biggest single contributor was probably combining 10/25 lockouts. That backed them into a bad corner and they've been trying to correct the mistake for the past 3 years. The problem is that their attempts at "fixing" only exacerbated the problem of...

Anonymous gameplay. Sure, it's technically possible to find your own tank for a dungeon and travel there, but why would a tank wait around for a group to form when he can get an instant queue pop with no travel and better rewards? They don't/won't. Server groups are virtually dead, but playing with strangers is not a sufficient substitute.

MoP tried to ram through a bunch of Cataclysm's failed ideas (LFR, hardwired specs, dumbed down talents, ridiculous stat bloat) while walking away from a lot of what made Wrath so good (epic leveling experience, great environments and music, meaningful lore, 10/25/HM, big loot tables, shared city, etc).

TOO MUCH CHANGE! Blizz gives players too much access to too much information. If Blizz wants players to ignore 5% theoretical difference in dps, then Blizz needs to start hiding some numbers from the theorycrafters. The new talents have been overhauled every single patch; they're like a meth head picking their scabs. There's no confidence that if you enjoy X talent that it will even exist in the next couple of months. The game is balanced enough already; the problem is not balance, it's theorycrafting and the resulting player-enforced mandates. Blizzard needs to break recount, WoL, and sims and integrate an in-game meter that only works for target dummies and for practice/personal benefit.

So, here's the deal though. Summer often sucks for guilds, and summer is really sucking right now. We raid fewer weeks than we fail to. Attendance issues suck. Roster churn sucks. Losing progress and failing to farm both suck. I hate raiding lately, but it's probably not ToT's fault. I do have one objective complaint, and that's the linearity. Raiding 4.5 hours/week is very harsh when you can't just choose not to do the bosses you don't care about this lockout (like you could in Ulduar, tier 14, etc.).

The problem isn't summer. Or Valentines, or Memorial Day, or Labor Day, or back-to-school, or finals, or Halloween, or vacations, or anything else. Attendance and recruitment are problems with server community and anonymous-play short-term substitutes. Not every guild has these problems, but it's a phenomenon that did not used to be so prevalent. During Cata it was happening with 25-mans more and more to the point that they're virtually extinct.

So, as we know the news of the sub decline is all over the place now and endless throwing of words ensues from it.

But, lets talk here about what, seriously, happened in mists that caused such a decline.

Or how about we accept that this is the reality of ANY game?

The only real debate worth having on this topic is whether Blizzard have done well to hang on to 7.7M subs, or done badly to lose 2.5M so far this expansion.

The basic principles everyone needs to grasp are as follows:

EVERYONE who has ever played WoW WILL get tired of it eventually (those who don't died first - same end result as far as the game is concerned). It's simply a question of how long it will take.
As the game gets older, it will struggle more and more to attract new players, because it is old.

Combine these 2 simple uncontestable concepts and the nett result is obvious.

As for the thread topic, MoP is for me the best expansion. What I did not like however:
- Valor gear double gating: There is already a gating (the cost of the piece). There should not be additional one imo. I hated the decision to gate the 5.2 valor gear to raid reputation. It forced me to run LFR just for the sake of getting rep. That's a bad design. Even if I love to daily quests, I think it should not have been gated to faction reputation in 5.0. neither. If they really fear we would gear up to quickly, just increase the valor cost of those pieces.
-A minor nitpick: Horde and Alliance main hub should not have been so close of each other. They are at war and we hear they are living "peacefully" at close range in the Vale? They should have spreaded out the 2 cities in different zones.
-Alt unfriendly. The expansion has been a bit alt unfriendly. They added nice elements to promote alt play like faction commendations to increase reputation or account-wide mounts and pets or the 50% valor buff. The next step should be to put secondary professions (or some of them like fishing and first-aid) account-wide as well.

Honestly I think we can just say LFR as a whole as a huge fail in MoP (as are dailies, but that's another post). LFR worked in 4.3 because players didn't have to run it. If they felt like getting some extra chance at gear, or just wanted to see it, or a guild were short on members, they did LFR to fill the gap.

The problem was LFR fell off at the end of the expansion as did DS as a whole because people burnt out on it. This is an issue of LFR being cleared too fast and too often, not because not enough players were running it.

So Blizz essentially mandates LFR in MoP by gating gear behind raid reps, gating normal by having LFR-quality items, etc. I hope next expansion Blizz steps back from LFR and returns it to being an optional thing. You START in flex-size, and can run LFR only if you're lacking the minimum 10 people with you for flex/normal/heroic.

But they won't. They'll still make mandatory LFR, and might make it even more mandatory because they need to "cater" to players who don't want to group, who don't want to make friends, who just want to bot and resell their account.

Originally Posted by Lumineus

World of Wisconsin. We travel to the real world to fight the minions of the latest Old god, Kurdwheychez the unudderable. Introducing the long-awaited cow level.

Honestly I think we can just say LFR as a whole as a huge fail in MoP (as are dailies, but that's another post). LFR worked in 4.3 because players didn't have to run it. If they felt like getting some extra chance at gear, or just wanted to see it, or a guild were short on members, they did LFR to fill the gap.

The problem was LFR fell off at the end of the expansion as did DS as a whole because people burnt out on it. This is an issue of LFR being cleared too fast and too often, not because not enough players were running it.

So Blizz essentially mandates LFR in MoP by gating gear behind raid reps, gating normal by having LFR-quality items, etc. I hope next expansion Blizz steps back from LFR and returns it to being an optional thing. You START in flex-size, and can run LFR only if you're lacking the minimum 10 people with you for flex/normal/heroic.

But they won't. They'll still make mandatory LFR, and might make it even more mandatory because they need to "cater" to players who don't want to group, who don't want to make friends, who just want to bot and resell their account.

I think the way forward would be

LFR - Delay it like they did in MOP have lower level items than in normal flex.

Have Flex/Normal/Heroic open from day 1. Have the loot follow like this

example Ilevels LFR: 701 Flex: 710 Normal: 719 Heroic: 728 - Then have it so LFR has items that cover all the item slots accross all the raids that are released. Flex/Normal will have the slightly more items than LFR to give some more incentive to run them. Heroic will have an additional boss/new boss phases to make the fights different and ofc some additional loot items.

It stops LFR from feeling mandatory for those who have no will power of their own. While providing incentives to dip your toes into the next raid up.

I think Blizzard got the Misconception that with LFR availability, Normal Raids should be tuned for People who were raiding together as a Team for a long time and use Voice communication, i.e. making Normal Modes too hard. I know there was harder Raids like Muru in the Past but for today's time the current Normals are too difficult, safe for JinRokh.

Another stupid decision was to put 2-3 Days respawn Timers on some World Bosses. They changed it back now but it's too late. Don't think anybody called Blizzard and told them "You know what woudl be cool? Waiting some Days for a Boss to respawn, then spamming AoE on the Ground for Hours, hoping to be in the tag Team!"

Honestly, they need to update. SC has been around for what? 8 years? Diablo has been around for like 20? Warcraft what 20? WoW is coming up on ten years. It's time for something new from them. Let WoW fizzle out, take dev time away from the game and focus it all on Titan. Get that shit out. Make it good, release it.

It just didn't improve enough on what cataclysm fucked up. Plain and simple, Cataclysm was fucking horrible, and it would have taken an absolutely amazing expansion. Even better than BC or Wrath, to get WoW back on track.

MOP was good, but it was nowhere near that good. People saw that, and realized the game wasn't ever going to be as good as it had been again, and so the drain began again in earnest.